‘Strategic troublemaking’ for peace: Europe needs a new defence plan if it wants to play negotiator
To broker peace, you need to understand war. This is how Europe can toughen its outlook to be better prepared.
Journalist Robert Kagan once quipped that Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus – meaning that the former are attuned to power politics, while the latter remain preoccupied with peace and diplomacy. It’s a bon mot, though one that ignores centuries of history. The foundational texts of strategic thought, from Thucydides and Machiavelli to Clausewitz, all hail from the Old Continent. Grand strategy is not an innate American trait; it’s a lost European art. Decades of outsourcing security to Washington has caused Europe’s strategic muscles to atrophy. But given that this intellectual deficit is partly an educational failure, it’s a fixable problem.
The consequences have been evident in national security pronouncements in the past couple of years, particularly in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Scrambling to confront a revanchist Russia and fracturing global order, European capitals churned out documents cluttered with unachievable aspirations that ignored hard realities. Germany’s 2023 strategy listed nine core goals that promised robust territorial defence and preserved social-market spending, entirely ignoring the brutal fiscal trade-offs required to fund a modern military. The EU’s 2022 Strategic Compass, meanwhile, pledged to become a “security provider”, without ever defining what the concept would mean in practice.
Beyond this vagueness, some of Europe’s key powers consistently confused strategic means with ultimate ends. In 2022, France explicitly declared that its core objective was to be a “balancing power… by 2030”, treating international influence as a self-fulfilling goal – a fixation with prestige usually reserved for autocracies. Similarly, the UK’s strategic review a year later targeted an “open and stable international order” as an end in itself, forgetting that it’s merely a tool used to cultivate peace and prosperity.
Some of these omissions are being fixed in the latest iterations of strategic blueprints. But to understand how European strategy became so decoupled from reality, we should also look to its universities. For a generation, European higher education has treated international relations as a playground for normative ideals, viewing the study of raw military power with deep suspicion. However, we study war for the same reason that medical researchers study cancer: to understand and defeat it. A lack of academic rigour undermines democracy. When civilian leaders are strategically illiterate, they lose the capacity to exercise meaningful oversight over military affairs.
Reclaiming this lost art requires moving beyond one of Europe’s favourite reflexes: box-ticking. Simply adding a few elective modules or convening an advisory committee will not suffice. Instead, Europe needs a cultural shift that welcomes strategic “troublemakers” – analysts who challenge assumptions rather than rubber-stamping them. In the short term, dry policy papers should be replaced with immersive war-gaming, forcing leaders to experience the visceral, agonising choices of high-intensity conflict before a real crisis strikes. Europe can no longer afford to treat strategy as an American intellectual import. It’s time to study power once more or prepare to be dictated to by those who do.
